May 17, 2008

Full-Blooded Americans

by hilzoy

A few days ago, I read a column by Kathleen Parker. It was offensive and racist, but since I read it at Town Hall and have a bad memory for names, I thought she was just one of those Town Hall lunatics, and didn't bother to write about it. But then, reading Glenn Greenwald this morning, I discovered that she is published in the Washington Post, where her column today begins:

"Well, at least they didn't kiss.

I was bracing myself for the lip lock Wednesday when John Edwards endorsed Barack Obama."

Don't bother to read the rest: it's just one veiled insinuation after another, without any substance at all. Just ask yourself: why does the Washington Post publish this woman? Moreover, why does it syndicate her columns? Googling for the first column - the one I haven't gotten to yet -- I discovered that thanks to the Washington Post Writers' Group, it ran all over the place: in the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune, all sorts of places. Here's what all those lucky people got to read:

""A full-blooded American."

That's how 24-year-old Josh Fry of West Virginia described his preference for Sen. John McCain over Sen. Barack Obama. His feelings aren't racist, he explained. He would just be more comfortable with "someone who is a full-blooded American as president." Whether Mr. Fry was referring to Mr. McCain's military service or Mr. Obama's Kenyan father isn't clear [ed. note: hahahahahaha], but he may have hit upon something essential in this presidential race.

Full-bloodedness is an old coin that's gaining currency in the new American realm. Meaning: Politics may no longer be so much about race and gender as about heritage, core values and made-in-America. Just as we once had and still have a cultural divide in this country, we now have a patriot divide. (...)

It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots. (...)

We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants - and we are. But there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice. (...)

The "guns, God and gays" trope has haunted Democrats, and Republicans have enjoyed dusting it off when needed to rile the locals. It's an easy play.

But so-called ordinary Americans aren't so easily manipulated, and they don't need interpreters. They can spot a poser a mile off, and they have a hound's nose for snootiness. They've got no truck with people who condescend or tolerance for that down-the-nose glance from people who don't know the things they know.

What they know is that their forefathers fought and died for an America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years. What they sense is that their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative. And they fear what else might get lost in the remodeling of America.

Republicans more than Democrats seem to get this, though Sen. Hillary Clinton has figured it out. And, the truth is, Mrs. Clinton's own DNA is cobbled with many of the same values that rural and small-town Americans cling to.

She understands viscerally what Mr. Obama has to study."

Forefathers? Bloodlines? DNA?

Here's a little experiment. I, like Barack Obama, am the child of one parent who was born in America, and one who came here from overseas; like Barack Obama, I was born and raised in this country. Do you think Kathleen Parker would have written this column about me -- about how, despite being born and raised here, I "have to study" American values, how I don't have sufficient "blood equity" in this country, how I don't have the right values 'in my DNA', and so forth -- because my mother is Swedish? I don't.

Here's another experiment: imagine this same column written about a candidate whose father was a Jew who had come here from Eastern Europe and married an American. Imagine that Kathleen Parker wrote that this candidate wasn't a "full-blooded American", that his DNA wasn't "cobbled with" the right values, that because only one of his parents was from this country, and only half his ancestors had fought and died for it, he just didn't have the right "bloodlines" to be President. Does anyone doubt for a moment that that would be antisemitic? I don't.

If I wanted to get into bloodlines, I might note that Barack Obama's grandfather fought in Patton's army, or that he's related to Dick Cheney and Brad Pitt. But I don't. American values are not passed on by blood. They are not found in anyone's DNA. Barack Obama was born and raised here. He doesn't "have to study" American values.

Kathleen Parker, on the other hand, could stand to brush up on them. And so could the Washington Post. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Comments

Several commenters at Greenwald's remarked that the "White Southerners" fought and died in a war against the United States. Is that a case of "I was against it before I was for it"? on the side of the proud Southerners or were they the "true" US while the Union was just a pretender*?

[Zell] Miller is not alone, though some are more sanguine when it comes to evaluating the roster of contenders. Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot.

Why the West has seen it necessary to diminish motherhood so that women can pretend to be men remains a mystery to sane adults. It should be unnecessary to say that the military is not a proper vehicle for social experimentation but is a machine dedicated to fighting and, if necessary, killing.

Women may be able to push buttons as well as men can, but the door-to-door combat in Fallujah proved the irrelevance of that argument. Meanwhile, no one can look at photos of the 15 British marines and sailors and argue convincingly that the British navy is stronger for the presence of Acting Leading Seaman Faye Turney -- no matter how lovely and brave she may be.

This reminds me of a scene in the Orson Welles movie "The Stranger" about a Nazi war criminal living in the States (Welles) pursued by a Nazi hunter (EG Robinson). Welles is a respectable member of the community and hosts Robinson for dinner, knowing Robinson is on his trail. At dinner, he delivers a chilling monologue that starts off cordially and then, as he lets the façade slip, he expounds on Germany and the Nazi philosophy. He claims that the Germans are not waiting for another Messiah a la Jesus but rather another Hitler. At one point, Robinson interjects something along the lines of "You say this is true of all Germans, but what about a German like Karl Marx?" Welles replies, "But Marx wasn't German, he was Jewish."

She does seem a skilled juggler of nonsense hot-button memes (The Dog Whistler?), just don’t look at her hands.
It only makes it worse because there are the rudiments of intelligence, bound hand and foot with predispositions to constructed and directed chaos of thought. Guaranteed to stick or your money back.

Ah, the old days. It was called perversity then. And we didn’t like it.Spin seems so venial by comparison.

Speaking of the old days, would this stuff get published under Katharine Graham in her prime? Nostalgia isn’t coterminous with memory.
Always hoping to keep those niches in the Pantheon filled.

I think somebody needs to give Kathleen Parker's bloodlines a very careful going over. I smell a Nazi sympathizer with tainted DNA somewhere in her dubious past. To what fever swamps of treason do her bloodlines lead? Any ties to Oswald Mosely? What were her ancestors up to, when blood equity was being totalled up? Who did they support in WW2? The Great War? The War between the States? The Revolutionary War? The English Civil War?

/snark

[oh, and just for the record, my ancestors fought on the side of the Allies in WW1 and the Union in the US Civil War, while missing WW2 due to age. They probably were on the patriot side in the US Revolutionary War. The 1640's are a complete mystery.]

What a revolting piece of volkish nonsense. When she says "Just as we once had and still have a cultural divide in this country, we now have a patriot divide.", that is pretty much the only true statement in the article. Too bad for her that she is on the wrong side of that divide. Let's hope that sunlight does prove to be the best form of disinfectant, in this case.

Unfrotunately there is a certain percentage of the population that will see Obama as the "other" and the Republicans will push ehte idea as hard as they can.

Hrc's coded language about how white hardworking people will vote for her was a reference to this phenomenon.

But yeah, the idea of a mainstream media is that certain media outlets are respecgtable and responsible and therefore meainstream. By pushing this kind of crap on the MSM WaPo is legitimizing the attitudes of the writer which seem to be a toxic mix of homophobia, xenophobia and racism.

"But so-called ordinary Americans aren't so easily manipulated, and they don't need interpreters. They can spot a poser a mile off, and they have a hound's nose for snootiness. They've got no truck with people who condescend or tolerance for that down-the-nose glance from people who don't know the things the things they know."

I have a dream. I dream that a black man and a black woman shall no longer be relegated to the subordinary, but shall rise by their God-given talents to the extraordinary .... to look down upon the ordinary, The latter of whom, when asked to reach among the stars for their destiny, prefer to say ah shucks I'd rather stay in town and tend bar and maybe get a GED later, after securing the subprime loan on the trailer home and the skidoo.

And yet, they dream they live in an exceptional country and culture, which they do, but unfortunately, because of their quintessential ordinariness, ends up grading on the curve to remain exceptional.

I have a dream. I dream of the day when we don't need interpreters, especially gay interpreters, not to mention black interpreters, to tell us what we already know, which is open to interpretation expressed in bad grammer and syntax, which is why we seek charter schools so that the truth shall chase us from place to place and depants us against our will, in God's name.

I have a dream. That posers shall be spotted far and wide, especially on cable TV reality shows and in Jerry Springer's audience of extremely ordianry people, who are of my ilk, but let me look "ilk" up because my parents got really pissed at the teachers in the public schools who constantly taught us the meaning of "ilk", but was I listening? No, sirree, because I had a dream. So , my parents beseeched and berated the school board who, in their elitist way, refused to admit that I was the incorrigible dumbass who had been pulling the wool over my parent's eyes.

I have a dream. To know the things that other people know so that I know something even though what they know seems a little elitist to me and far-be-it-from-me from to look down my nose at people who know next to nothing because they are the salt of the earth, but know not the chemical notation for salt, because to do so would be elitist, in a black, Richard Pryor sort of way, and we can't have that in this United States of America which is filmed above the hips, because when the hips are filmed we're in Little Richard and James Brown territory and pretty soon our white daughters are reciting the periodic table while gettin their groove on, which is both elitist and hot, but try not to think about it.

Barack Obama: The black man who went from nothing and rose to snootiness and lookee-down-the-nosiness without ever passing through, you know, regula old American.

My sister-in-law is a full-blooded Type 3 Democrat. Northern European ancestry, Stanford Undergrad, Yale Law, public service in a black neighborhood after graduation, the whole nine yards. For purposes of family harmony, this is written under a pen name.

They have two young kids about to enter the school system. Coincidentally, they recently moved to a white and Asian neighborhood. She explained how the school system was excellent. But I suspect that the real reason for the move is that she didn’t want her kids going to school with blacks. I believe that ‘good schools’ is PC code for ‘no blacks’. It very well may be subliminal for somebody at her level of indoctrination.

Ironically, unlike my sister-in-law, I go fishing and out to eat on a periodic basis with black and brown people. It’s a business relationship, but I have convinced myself that we actually get along pretty good. I have a good time at least. I suspect that one reason we get along well is that they find me more genuine than they would someone like my sister-in-law.

Meanwhile, immigration trends have shifted dramatically in the past 40 years, as growing percentages of Americans are foreign-born. In 1970, just 4.7 percent or 9.6 million people of the total population were foreign-born. By 2000, 11.1 percent or 31.1 million individuals were foreign-born, according to the Census.

So, for seventy damned years straight the foreign born population of this nation was equal to or higher than the level that is making Kathleen Parker pee her pants. And, somehow, the Republic survived.

Parker is a xenophobic idiot. She brings nothing to the table other than her own bile.

Some people are in a position of privilege. Sometimes it's handed to them on a platter, sometimes they work their behinds off for it, sometimes they're just in the right place at the right time.

Part of the deal with being in a position of privilege is that the vicissitudes of ordinary life often don't really touch you all that much.

That can be a point of resentment for other folks. When that happens, as I see it it's actually those other folks' problem. I'm just some guy on the other end of a wire, so whatever you want to make of that observation is purely up to you.

But FWIW there it is.

It also doesn't mean that folks in a position of privilege don't have a contribution to make in the area of public policy. Just because you, personally, aren't necessarily going to be affected all that much by public policy doesn't mean you don't have useful insights into what that public policy should be.

All of the above may apply to your Type 3's as well.

Just saying.

Not sure what to make of your Type 2's. Probably best to leave it at that.

Type 2s are sub-sets of various demographic groups, by no means including all members of those sub-groups. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are Type 2s. La Raza is Type 2. Most of the Hispanics I’ve worked with seem to be Type 1s or Republicans.

My old Middle School used to be in a working-class ‘full-blooded American’ region. You’ve probably heard of the shootings in the Chicago area this year. The level of violence is unprecedented in the neighborhoods in which they are taking place.

The reason I’m told is that the ‘projects’ have been shut down and those within them are being sent into the neighborhoods with Section 8 housing vouchers. I got detention in middle school once for yelling in someone’s ear. That was about as bad as it got.

There are now gangs and drugs in my old school. I suspect the reason that Parker’s writings seem to be getting traction is that most people cannot afford to move when their neighborhoods change for the worse. They have to live with the consequences of someone else’s idealism.

What struck me about the "Dems hug it out" column wasn't so much the pathetic gay baiting, but the projection. Parker felt compelled to call Obama and Edwards out for figuratively hugging, when she must be aware of Bush and McCain's famous hug.

the media still lags public sentiment. they're hiring and publishing pundits who might have made marketing sense 2003. it took them 5 years to catch onto the permanent Republican majority. but things have long since changed.

I just checked up on Parker's Nov 2, 2003 column, which used the same trope of quoting a salt-of-the-earth type to provide her theme. This is the first of two cited by cleek, May 17, 2008 at 06:42 PM. The link goes to an interesting analysis at Buzzflash of how different versions were disseminated, one calling for Democratic politicians to be shot, the other calling for them to be slapped. Parker explained that he was under duress, as a close friend of many years, a Native American nicknamed "Chief," had just been killed in Afghanistan. Parker gave several different "explanations" about why the versions were different.

Picking up on a comment made at Buzzflash, I decided to check and see whether I could verify that some soldier nicknamed "chief" had indeed been killed in Afghanistan during this time-frame. I found only one Army fatality in Afghanistan in all of October, and none on November 1. I found a picture, and he is clearly NOT Native American.

From this I can only conclude that Parker is, at best, an unreliable reporter, and at worst a pure fabricator. I intend to inquire further, but this is what I found in just 30-40 minutes time.

Ya, but CIA is hiring immigrants and normally they don't; if they can get them killed(foreign born).

DNA makes sense if like your untraceable, except to Atlantis or something. Like, went to space and had the bad gene (X) removed and put back down or, worse, born missing the bad gene all other humans have; but we don't want to scare the President or anything since all aliens are evil and no one is sure which dem is 'getting it' over the UN dem vote call up like Florida stuff.

Then there is the cult of females who are sent out of Bethesda to get those special genetics, which it turns out really are special, so don't panic about Hilly's genetics cause I'm sure she's not an X and same with the other ones. McCain might be because they probably went after his, but he was tortured so no one can be sure............

Full blood may actually be a deletion genetically and no one should panic when it is above things like countries and families and is really like Capt. Dillon Hunt on Andromeda, not BSG original. Anyway, sometimes avoiding the first rule is impossible, especially if it repeatedly stated.

Anyway, those immigrants are in for some surprises. Plame wants a future and they have those.

It occurs to me that this is the Broder/Brooks phenomenon, where they project their own worldviews onto 300 million citizens. This woman is wrestling with her own personal demons and using the Post as her ring.

Well, I should certainly hope that whoever would be president of this country would have enough going on upstairs that they could look down their noses at some of us. To quote Bill Murray's memorable character in the movie Stipres;
"We're all very different people. We're not Watusi, we're not Spartans. We're Americans with a capital A,huh? And you know what that means? Do you? That means our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We're the underdog. We're mutts."
In the blood? DNA? What a load of crap. No it isn't. It is in the the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights which it took actual smart people time to sit down and think and come up with and then the rest of us thought a moment and said, "Yeah, that sounds about right."
That woman does not speak about pride and patriotism. That is vanity and arrogance and such insecurity about themselves that they have to smear other people rather than admit that they might have ever been or could ever be wrong
about anything. I don't want to "have a beer" with the guy or lady, I want them to run the country. If they can do it well enough to protect, preserve and defend the values enshrined in the Bill of Rights (those are the true American values as far as I'm concerned, not to be too snooty about it) then I'm good. Nothing tops that as far as I'm concerned. Not personal safety, not "protecting us from terrorists" and certainly not anyone's particular self esteem issues.

What you fail to note is that Parker is also peddling her own toxic idealism. She's touting the myth of the 'real' American.

There are no 'real', as opposed to 'false', Americans. There is certainly nothing to found in anyone's blood that identifies them as an American. What makes people Americans is not their race, language, annual income, sexual preference, favorite sport, or whether they hunt or drink lattes.

What makes people Americans is that they were (a) born here, or (b) chose to come live here and assume the responsibilities of citizenship. Full stop.

You don't care for 'Type 2' Democrats like Sharpton or Jackson, because all they do is stir up resentment against whitey. Parker is exactly the same. The purpose of her work is to stir up resentment on the part of some of us toward others of us.

Perhaps you find the particular resentments she nurtures to be more sympathetic than the ones allegedly nurtured by guys like Jackson or Sharpton. That's your issue to sort out, and good luck with it.

But it doesn't make what she's peddling any less noxious. And, to the degree that her curdled form of idealism wins the day, lots and lots of people will be living with the consequences of that for quite a while as well.

Kathleen Parker was not hired to present a legitimate point of view; she appears at WaPo to attract the curious, like a giantess or a bearded lady. Since click-thrus are everything in this game, the only way to discipline the Post for her presence is to boycott their site.

White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement by Allan J. Lichtman (Author)

This book is currently blowing my mind.

Spanning nearly one hundred years of American political history, and abounding with outsize characters--from Lindbergh to Goldwater to Gingrich to Abramoff--White Protestant Nation offers a penetrating look at the origins, evolution, and triumph (at times) of modern conservatism. Lichtman is both a professor of political history at American University and a veteran journalist, and after ten years of prodigious research, he has produced what may be the definitive history of the modern conservative movement in America. He brings to life a gallery of dynamic right-wing personalities, from luminaries such as Strom Thurmond, Phyllis Schlafly, and Bill Kristol to indispensable inside operators like financiers Frank Gannett and J. Howard Pew. He explodes the conventional wisdom that modern conservative politics began with Goldwater and instead traces the roots of today’s movement to the 1920s. And he lays bare the tactics that conservatives have used for generations to put their slant on policy and culture; to choke the growth of the liberal state; and to build the most powerful media, fundraising, and intellectual network in the history of representative government. White Protestant Nation is entertaining, provocative, enlightening, and essential reading for anyone who cares about modern American politics and its history.

Dowd at her worst was never remotely as bad as Parker. Dowd is over-clever, over-cute, hung up on trivia, long missing the point, long lacking any sense of perspective or proportion, and long past her sell-by date.

imagine this same column written about a candidate whose father was a Jew who had come here from Eastern Europe and married an American.

This may be too optimistic. The implication is that sucha column wouldn't be written. But there's no question a lot of people who feel the way Parker does about Obama, feel the same way about Jews.

In fact, if a Jewish democrat were running for president, I would expect some Kathleen Parker type to pen pretty much exactly your hypothetical column. And it's not beyond imagining that the Post would print it.

West Virginia (like the rest of Appalachia) is nativist, and very pro-military, and very traditional. (And you all ignorami who think it's pro-Confederate really need to look up it's history sometime.) So I think that your mother being from Sweden would attract many of the same comments; they'd be mitigated by the fact that it's your mother, not your father, but "we paid for this land with blood, and you aren't part of the group that did" is a common and non-racist attitude all through the Appalachian belt.

West Virginia (like the rest of Appalachia) is nativist, and very pro-military, and very traditional.

"we paid for this land with blood, and you aren't part of the group that did" is a common and non-racist attitude all through the Appalachian belt.

IMO this analysis is right on. I'm sure the antipathy to Obama is racially based to some degree, but I'll bet it's far more a matter of him being a sort of person that Appalachian and Ohio Valley folks just don't relate to.

All of which would make Parker's piece a perceptive piece of socio-political analysis if she were merely observing and commenting on it, rather than embracing it.

Everyone belongs to some tribe or other, and everyone carries some resentment toward folks not in their tribe. Actually, maybe not hilzoy, but she is really kind of an exceptional person. But most people, yes.

That's a reality, and taken as a reality, it's really not worth getting indignant about. It just is what it is, and we all do what we can to work around it so that we can get along. C'est la vie.

Resentment and xenophobia embraced on the op-ed page of national newspapers is, I think, a different kettle of fish.

And not for nothing, but I can't think of a single acre of this country that hasn't been paid for in blood, rightly or wrongly. Other folks just don't make such a big deal out of it.